PAN ADOLESCENT BY THEDA KENYON A silver silence held the deep-leaved glen: Lithe music but the earth was dumb. Madly, the leaves went tripping on their way; The squirrel leaped in dainty ecstasies; The birds flung forth gay challenge, and the breeze and piped the soul into the day! And then Pan of the topaz eyes, where the brook lights glimmer, Over the moss-starred bank slips a joyous Nereid Pipe, Pan, pipe! What undertone brings you this discord? See Look! On the edge of the brook, like a master-carved opal, Pan of the topaz eyes where Desire is a-glimmer, Pan of the eager hands, and the burning lips, Pan of the heart of man, where the god-lights shimmer, or love? A leaden silence holds the deep-leaved glen: A weighty silence, dead, unlistening- Pipe, Pan, pipe! . . . yet will you be deserted! Nymphs and Nereids flee from the lure of your lay. Pipe, Pan, pipe! Alas, you have lost your enchantment! You have found that the world holds tears: they have stolen your May! TWO POEMS BY NORA B. CUNNINGHAM STRANGENESS When youth and joy still walked with me, My soul was sore afraid. But now I see with calmer eyes For death is not more strange than birth DESERT There is neither tree nor cloud to break The waste of sand and sky. How small the shadow that I make Here there are neither joys nor dreams— The spent soul wavereth How small a thing my own life seems Stark, between Life and Death. TWO WALKS BY STARK YOUNG It was the beginning of June when I came to Tivoli. Around the town with the grey, dark stone of its houses and streets spread the yellow country of the harvest. It stretched away over the plains, past Hadrian's villa, toward the Campagna and Rome and the hills beyond. Only here and there rose the black points of cypresses and clumps of ilex and the verdure winding sometimes along beside a stream. It was a wide, clear world of light, a golden expanse from which the hill arose, with its woods and their cataracts, and the grey town, with the Cardinal d'Este's villa on one side the slope. In my mind, as I went along on my way to the Villa d'Este, I carried the utmost idea of romantic gardens, of sombre and splendid avenues of trees, and ancient marbles and now and then a ruined fountain; a dream of past splendor and half-forgotten courts. In my mind's eye I had that picture that one sees everywhere in houses and in shops, of the stone table with the two benches and, stretching away behind them, an aisle with dark cypresses on either side. But the truth was that I was translating these qualities into my own conceptions of them; and now, when I arrived at the villa, the translation of my romantic and sombrely poetic idea back again into these Italian meanings was to be sudden and illuminating. For in that light of afternoon the first thing that shot across my mind when I saw the d'Este garden was how much less obviously romantic it was than I had thought. The table and the benches were near the villa itself; the wide paved promenade ran in front of the windows and led by stairs here and there to lower levels, where the cypress walk began. And this walk was neither very romantically long nor mysterious. The d'Este garden was romantic, it had its mystery and possibility, but not in the sense that I had thought, It was more open, more supported by idea. Yet after all one may set down only the mood of this place. Form is impossible to describe, it alone can describe itself; and half the d'Este garden is formal. What those varying planes and levels are cannot be expressed; nor the nuances of the diverse heights to which the trees and plantations ascend; nor those stairs leading up and down, those patterns of walks and hedges, those arbors, that rondel of cypresses around a basin of water, those sudden on-comings where vistas lead out from the garden lines to the country that spreads away in a shining and soft transparency of summer air. The abstraction of pure form underlies this garden. The lines of natural things and of paths and plots of flowers and earth and shapes of water, are made to compose a pattern beyond themselves, something independent of them, a luminous geometry of pure idea. Abstract design underlies the garden as it does great music or painting. In this garden there were trees; there was infinite water coming down from the hillside above and led everywhere to a hundred jets and falls. There were rococo caverns with statues of deities, baroque gods and goddesses whose grottoes and caverns were filled with green shadows and streams and cascades and the drip and splash and rumor of unending water. There were pseudo ruins in stone and rococo antiquities. I saw a statue lying in two parts, as if despoiled by centuries, half buried in the ground. I saw the Diana of the Ephesians, colossal in sandstone, with the hundred breasts that nourished the world. At the end of a fading flight of steps, as if some acropolis had to be reached there, I saw the miniature conceit of an ancient classical city, scattered on a little terrace, temples, theatres and monuments done in stone and cement. I could hear at every step some unseen splashing of water and a steady murmur of streams of water falling in the cascades, the fountains and the tiny cataracts in the grottoes of those ornamental and redundant deities. The water of these was invisible, but on the aspect of the things in the garden lay its fantasy and sweetness. I came again and again to see that famous stairway that all artists sketch but none ever expresses, with its great jet of water rising into the air, its ivy, its two flights and their balustrade, descending with such gracious and incredible suavity and beauty to the terrace below. Three square pools, raised two feet and more from the ground, stretched in a line parallel with the villa's façade; they were lifted like mirrors above the level of the walks, and above them the boughs of the ilex trees hung down and lightly touched the water. The d'Este garden was first of all a majestic, sophisticated place done by a knowing hand. It was first grave and then ornate. The mind behind this art was beautiful; it was tragic; it was mature with a passion of knowledge and rich choice. For hours I walked, through lanes of ilex and laurel, and paths that led through copses and thickets smelling of pine and bay and oleanders, and down avenues of cypress trees. I seemed to be in the midst of a living silence. There was in the garden a kind of vivacity of quiet. Over by the wall nearest the town a group of workmen with a mandolin were laughing and talking and breaking out now and then into snatches of songs. A long plane of late golden light crept under the lowest boughs of the trees. The late twilight was drawing on. As the light grew less and less a completeness came over the d'Este garden around me. Now that the details of the grounds faded and the surrounding country and sky receded and grew dim, the garden seemed more to be one thing, the larger masses gathered all into themselves, the order and design of the place stood out. Night came on and gradual darkness. There was no moon but an early starlight showed above the trees and through the vistas opening out beneath. In the darkness the glint of the walks appeared and the lines of the balustrades. The unstirred surface of the raised pools was like dim glass. A low wind stirred the long shapes of the cypresses, and in the laurels and oleanders made a hushed rustling. In the heavy shade of the ilexes the nightingales were singing. And from everywhere, among the leaves and through the avenues and paths, there came the eternal sound of water. The quality of this place was mournful and rich and elegiac. It satisfied the tragic beauty that is the soul of the mind. The involved and extravagant elegance of this garden and its design, and the eloquence of its use of the natural resources of water and verdure and light and earth, were touched with the languor |